Hi Daniel! Good question! 2018 was packed for me. I survived a whole year on freelancing and it went better than I expected! I also completed the Udacity frontend nanodegree program and started with product design.

I'm starting my new year early and going hard on all the pending courses I'm taking now. My goal is to build an MVP which I ship to the public by June *fingers crossed.

I'll be asking a lot of questions on here, so get ready! @mrdanielschwarz@Graeme what books, blogs, courses do you recommend for young designers like me?

@mrdanielschwarz Yeah I think Alexa is the way to go for smart speakers! I'd only consider Siri or Google as they reach all the mobile devices.

But what I've seen so far is that smart speaker users actually use the voice features, whereas mobile phones less so.

I think voice will be here to stay, for me it makes sense - I hate looking through menus to find an app that I know is installed and want to open. So much easier to tell the phone to open it. And lots of situations where voice improves experience:

cooking

driving

from a bed

I'll have a new article soon on it, but I'll definitely be building something for voice too. What do you have in mind?

@Graeme For sure, I mean, to use Siri you need to have your hands free, which is a bit counterintuitive. Alexa turns on my Xbox while I'm still taking off my coat, which allows me to start playing quicker, and you can’t really put a price on that

But that aside, I definitely see voice being used with traditional UIs, especially for search functions as you said.

Funny you mention cooking because I'm working on a new venture called Nomad Noms that is basically meal plans as a service, with city food guides coming later (hence the term Nomad Noms). It's a natural fit for cooking, as well as being able to search for a specific plan with a specific recipe, or finding out what your next scheduled meal is.

Ah yes it's true, every time I trie to use Siri, it tells me I have to first unlock my phone

Nomad Noms

oo! sounds cool, this would be useful for me! I'm just eating anything from Cafes at the moment. It's hard to plan meals with balancing work and getting to know a new place. Looking forward to giving feedback!

@mrdanielschwarz all the same problems here, but Vegan is not so hard in Madrid! Always quite expensive though - we have had to start cooking more this week, and I'm lazy to do that. I have just been playing with a language school idea where we crowdsource language schools around the world - I found it quite hard to find and compare schools without first getting recommendations. I can imagine something similar for Nomad Noms - have you thought about crowdsourcing those factors and mapping them out? That'd be cool!

@mrdanielschwarz the big “new thing” for me this year was exploring what’s possible with serverless, but I think the big focus for 2019 will be fundamentals building across our entire stack (both design and development). What made learning React easy was a strong understanding of JavaScript. Trying to avoid constantly chasing that new new!

@d__bailey I’m so freaking vanilla having been self-taught code only for fulfilling side hustles (i.e. HTML/CSS/jQuery-sorta/PHP-sorta). Any advice for someone maybe wanting to learn real development? It’s been a decade and I’m still getting by with StackOverflow

@mrdanielschwarz without stack overflow I think half the internet would disappear...

Recommend Wes Bos’ 30 day JavaScript challenge and any of the vanilla courses on egghead.io - and even more highly recommend when you are working through a problem, try Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) docs as a starting point before stack overflow. MDN can help you build understanding of the fundamentals without jumping to solutions. All you really need to know is the type of variable you are working with (eg array, date) and then MDN is amazing at explaining what methods and properties are available.

Also, if you're thinking about frameworks to learn, check out this thread from Pieter Levels. He's using PHP and JQuery from back in the day, showing you don't need to learn the latest stuff to make cool stuff!